Smartphone is such a diverse and multi-dimensional subject that one book can't do justice to this domain. It's now an industry on its own right. My take was to provide the big picture on this evolving juggernaut so that tech business managers and engineers can develop a greater understanding of this critical technology area in one go.

My second book "Nokia's Smartphone Problem" is an effort to get focused and linear. Likewise, my upcoming book "Mobile Commerce 2.0" focuses on another crucial area related to smartphones. This book is expected to be launched in September this year.

Both sounds like interesting books, and I like the idea of collecting some of the milestones reported on the Internet and arranging them so that they make sense from a historical perspective. (I've seen several other attempts to do this. My favorite wasn't about tech at all; it was an anthology of blogs about the same political topic, allowing the reader to see a controversial topic from many points of view.) My own book, Web Rules, was a hybrid. The first half was based on my reporting on the Internet from 94-99; the second half was a collection of verbatim interviews with the likes of Andy Grove, Jerry Yang, Barry Diller, Ann Winblad, Mike Bloomberg, and others who were helping to shaping the Web during that time.

There was simply too much to cover -- major discoveries and developments, success and failure stories, and a maze of products at the fringe of smartphones. I had to even take out some critical areas, e.g. social networks, Qualcomm's role, etc.